'These are the stories we don't connect, the stories that wallpaper our lives, of women being beaten, raped and killed by men, and they're a consequence of inequality' Photograph: Corbis

Last January, in her bedroom in Walthamstow, Karen Ingala Smith started making a list. For over 10 years, two women have been killed through domestic violence in England and Wales every week, and she wanted to name them. She wanted the horror, their horror, their regular weekly horror, their lives, their relationships, to feel less abstract. So news story by news story, she collated their names. In the first three days of January 2012, seven women were murdered by men. Three were shot, two were strangled, one was stabbed and one was killed through 15 blunt-force trauma injuries. Some made it into the national media, but most were barely reported, stuck on local news sites between cat videos and a story about a library. "I just started counting," Karen says, "and once I'd started, I couldn't stop."

Last month, 12 women were killed through suspected male violence in the UK. Mayurathy Perinpamoorihy's age hasn't been published, but Danielle Roberts was 21, Anu Kapoor was 27, Caroline Parry was 46, Judith Maude was 57, Gail Lucas was 51, Orina Morawiec was 21, Julie Connaughton was 57, Sabrina Moss 24, Jane Wiggett was 57, Betty Gallagher was 87, and Merissa McColm was 31. After Merissa's body was found, her boyfriend was arrested on suspicion of murder and released on bail until the end of November. But these don't all involve allegations of domestic violence – it's wider than that, less exact. Men hurt women in order to exert power over them. These are the stories we don't connect, the stories that wallpaper our lives, of women being beaten, raped and killed by men, and they're a consequence of inequality. They're the sharp end of something that we all encounter, the knife point. The edge of our cliff.

This has been one of the warmest summers on record. August came at the end of a 19-day heatwave, where three soldiers died during a training exercise in the Brecon Beacons from heat-related illnesses. Where the sun's reflection off a skyscraper melted a car. Where behind bedroom doors these acts of violence towards women were happening and happening again.

It's those doors that I think about a lot. The smoked-glass screen between their violence and our world. When we suspect that a woman we know is in an abusive relationship, is one of the 25% of women experiencing domestic violence in their lives, what can we do to open that door? How can we help?

By talking. By telling them, gently, you're concerned. If you're wrong, oh well. If you're right? Well, even if she doesn't want to talk, or doesn't leave him, or does leave him but then returns, she knows you'll support her. You say things that remind her that it's not her fault, and you tell her it isn't her responsibility to make him change. But most of all, you say something. And you ease your way through the awfulness of that conversation with props like hot drinks and tears. And then, a week later, you talk to her again, and you try to understand that it often takes several goes for a woman to escape, several bags packed and unpacked, several train tickets bought.

Since she started, Karen has counted 199 dead women. The families of some of the women killed have got in touch to say thank you. But now she wants to stop. Rather than rely on Google and a laptop, she wants the government to take over. She wants it to officially collate the names and release them annually, and she wants them to use these cases to identify patterns in the crimes – she wants it to stop seeing these murders as isolated incidents. The aim, she says, is that we understand the things that are happening behind those doors and collectively act. That we understand the power imbalance that leads to these murders, and that we reach out, in this cold September heat, and help other women stay alive.